Your 2019 Marketing Plan — What Are The Trends?

08 Oct

The end of the year is fast approaching and with how quickly the industry can move, now is a pretty good time to start putting together your 2019 marketing plan. 2018 was the year of chatbots, conscious capitalism, and video content. While 2018’s marketing trends aren’t yet done and you should definitely still be looking at those strategies, there’s bigger and better things on the horizon and you gotta stay in the loop.

Voice Search

Voice searching is well and truly on the rise. In fact Klick reckon 30% of web browsing won’t be on screens by 2020. So, what is voice search? It’s searching through Siri, Alexa, Google, whoever your virtual assistant may be. They take form in the shape of mobile phones, iPads, computers, and now smart speakers (Google Home, Amazon Echo).

Voice search is for sure something you want to work into your 2019 marketing plan. It’s time to start looking into optimising for voice search and thinking about your target audience, how they might use voice search, and how you can benefit. So, what we can tell you is that most voice searches are question based. Because voice searches are typically longer than their text counterparts, long tail keywords are increasing in importance.

UGC – User Generated Content

User generated content varies from simply sharing user reviews to brands encouraging consumers to share their product with a hashtag. Does Frank Body ring a bell? What about #frank? Frank Body sell coffee skin scrubs and they built their brand on UGC. They encouraged girls to take selfies covered in Frank Body scrub, post them on Instagram, and hashtag #frank. What resulted was this influx of free advertising for Frank all over the gram…

It works because people are increasingly becoming untrusting of brands and big companies, but they trust other humans. Companies have been doing it for a little while now with notable campaigns being; Apple’s #shotoniphone campaign, GoPro’s videos, or Coke’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign. User generated content on social media has a 4.5% higher conversion rate.

Influencer Marketing

Again, this trend comes back to that increasing distrust consumers have in the big brands. If you’ve been living under a rock, influencer marketing is marketing through someone with a strong social media following or, the position to influence people. The top examples of this are clothing and beauty brands sending ‘Instagram models’ free products and paying them to post about the product.

One of the most successful examples of influencer marketing is HiSmile, which kicked off in 2014 with $20k and is reportedly on track for a $100 million turnover by the end of 2018. They relied almost entirely on influencers. Starting small with ‘grammers around their hometown of the Gold Coast, then ‘upgrading’ in influencers as the business grew. This year they saw Kylie and Kendall Jenner promote their product, proving influencer marketing is definitely worth looking into for your 2019 marketing plan.

Real Content

Another thing to consider for your 2019 marketing plan. Content marketing has been on the rise for a few years with marketers realising how valuable content can be for SEO and social media. This isn’t changing, it’s going to become more prominent in 2019. The increase in the desire for quality content comes from, you guessed it, people not trusting big businesses anymore. Instead people are trusting quality content, over advertising at least.

For the best results, create real, insightful content… it needs to be genuine and reputable information and it needs to say something new. It’s important to mention that content isn’t always blog posts or think-pieces, it can be a how-to video or even interactive data. Quality content creation encourages actual clicks, extended time on the page, and potential backlinks.

If you’re keen to start implementing SEO or Social Media Marketing in your digital marketing strategy, come in for a Deep Dive with the team.